They're trying to keep this old game alive and with a community. I think the initial release of Quake Live, or this move, has little to do with cashing in and very much to do with love of the game.
Moreover, "making it more fun" is pretty much what they are attempting. It's been a known problem for a long time that a new player will get completely owned when they first try, it's just such a brutally skill-based game and a small pool of players makes large skill differences more likely in matchmaking. Few people enjoy total domination by their opponent.
Quake 3/Quake Live used to be a living esport, now most of the big tournaments are gone. The game is beautiful, especially when played at a professional level. I'm all for any attempts to revitalize this genre so that the FPS duel might still be a thing in esports in the future. Of course the risk here is that the game becomes unrecognizeable.
Sad. I guess when they told us the Zenimax deal didn't affect their independence in any way they were "forgetting" some details. So, probably no more Linux ports, no more GPLing of older engines. I guess they gave the control to the suits. The reasoning doesn't sound very solid either, it's assuming that the only reason for anyone ever to run linux is that all of it is free software. I don't disagree with that being a very good reason but it's definitely not the only one. The same poor argument could be used for not doing a Mac port. And I thought anyone trying to run cutting edge games on Linux had to use the Nvidia driver anyway, Doom 3 didn't work too well on ATI when it came out anyway, did it?
I feel you missed my point. I was only arguing that your decisions should not only be based on what you can get away with when closely scrutinizing a law, license or a contract but that you should also consider what's ethical. Laws are usually (if they're any good) based on a moral code. Licenses and contracts try to reflect the wishes of the people who write them.
I am fully aware of the contents of the GPL and as someone said the spirit of the GPL can only be defined by the FSF so if you want to look past the legalese you look to what they are saying and they're saying selling GPLed software is okay. They probably wouldn't like doing it through the App Store though.
Personally I'm all for the GPL as meant to be read by the FSF but in a situation such as the one we are discussing where the authors have used the GPL but have not themselves written it so their understanding of it's spirit may have been wrong you're going to have to take into consideration what their understanding of the spirit in which they were giving you access to the code was also if you want to do the right thing instead of just the legal thing.
Unless your ethical view is that the author is not really supposed to have the kind of control granted by copyright law over their work in the first place so their opinion is not so important at this point. A valid way of looking at it as well but one that depends on ethics rather than just doing anything you can legally get away with.
So if you find a loophole in the law that lets you get away with murder you'd have no problem doing it? There's something to be said for respecting the wishes of the people licensing you the software even if they've not been able to craft a perfect, no-loopholes legal document to describe them.
Never mind Freenet for this, you could use I2P which also features in-network Bittorrent. Of course if you really want to only share the torrents with an anonymising network you'll need to do modifications but at least it'll be easier when you can use existing tracker software. TOR's hidden services would work as well I suppose.
Just hosting the tracker on one of these networks is an interesting idea. It wouldn't provide any protection for the downloaders and seeders themselves but if people aren't quite ready to sacrifice download speeds at least it would shift the attention back to the people downloading again if the indexing sites/trackers were impossible to attack. It would be a step in the right direction. I can see why no-one has done this so far though.
Takes nearly equal skill to appreciate a match between the masters? Bullshit. I've been following the competetive 1v1 scene for a long time and I sure as hell don't have that kind of skill but I can still see when someone's skill is unbeliveable just like I can when I watch a sport like hockey. I may miss some details but I can still appreciate it and see a difference between the lesser and better players.
It may be fast-paced but Quake 3 1v1 (and by extension Quake Live) is very strategy-oriented. The main concern is about controlling the map by denying the powerups from your opponent which can be done by carefully timing the item spawns so the enemy never gets to see them.
Besides that, there are a number of ways you can play the game of course. Hastily engaging or staying back and avoiding confrontations etc.
Whether people will buy it or not if they cannot pirate it is purely academic since a computer game that is not based on online-play only will without a doubt be cracked. Show me one case where this isn't true.
It's hard to run the numbers because there are no numbers for a thing like this. All we know is that piracy is running rampant even with copy protection in use in gaming for as long as I can remember and all games so far get cracked unless they are online games where the server cannot be tampered with.
Now introducing a copy protection that is just as crackable as all those previous ones but making it highly inconvenient for the paying customers, even more so than a typical copy protection. I'm sure that this is going to be very successful in combating piracy. Especially seeing as it is now done on a platform whose users are more anti-DRM than average computer users.
We have lots of previous evidence how copy protection just does not work. Why exactly would this be better?
There are tons of bookmark sync sites, but what I'd really like not to lose is the ability to restore whatever tabs I had open when I closed my browser. Like session restore but without a crash. Doing that across different machines is cute but I'd settle even for a local one. Anything else that does this out there?
Oh, but there's another way to look at it. The line length should be such that it is readable, a general rule is that that amounts to around 7-10 words. Print & web layout designers frequently try to make the line length a readable one instead of just going with as long lines as possible. The downside is that then there may be a lot of unused space on the screen if the user has a big screen. Multiple paragraphs could fix that but it's not a trivial thing to do when screen sizes vary so much.
I don't see where he says he considers OpenBSD + ports non-free. He is simply saying that he will not recommend something that advocates the use of non-free software, even if this is done just by making it very easy to install some of it (or for example containing advertisements and links to non-free software products).
It has nothing to do with whether OpenBSD itself is free or not, that is an entirely separate question from "What distribution would Richard Stallman recommend for you?"
Claiming that there is no difference seems to be what RMS was himself referring to in his post to the mailing list when he said:<blockquote><i> "It looks like some people are having a discussion in which they construct views they would find outrageous, attribute them to me, and then try to blame me for them."</blockquote></i>
He also did not, apparently, begin this discussion about what he does or does not recommend himself but was just responding to an ongoing discussion there.
Try reading a little harder. He did not deem it non-free. He said he will not and does not personally recommend OpenBSD to people. Big difference and I can understand his position.
The article gives just a couple of examples, but they're obviously examples of many. The guy spent 11 full days on the stand. The one pretty incriminating example of evidence cited in the article is the fact that he removed the passenger seat of his car just after his wife's disappearance, then hosed down the interior and left an inch of standing water on the floor boards. Now, you tell
me why any average person has reason to do that. I can tell you that in 20 years of car ownership and six different cars, I have never once taken the passenger seat out of my car, thrown it away and then hosed down the interior, and I don't know anyone else who has either. His explanation was that he liked to sleep in the car and wanted the extra room. Does this sound plausible to you?
He was sleeping in the car because he wanted her mother to get custody of the kids and he thought being the suspect of a murder investigation the odds of that succeeding would be better if he was not living in his mother's house. This all of course according to Hans. By the way, can you explain what could have happened in the car that would have required Hans to do all those three things? (two of them significantly after the fact)
So, let's just look at this *one* piece of evidence. Guy's wife disappears. He then immediately removes the seat from his car, which is never seen again, and he hoses down the interior of the car. That doesn't paint a picture for you? Now, let's say you ask the guy why he did that and he gives you a laughably ridiculous explanation. And let's say this goes on for 11 days as the prosecution asks him to explain every other piece of evidence, and his explanations are no less ridiculous in each case.
He did not immediately remove the seat. He did it around 10 days afterwards and was stopped by a police officer for speeding with the seat intact before he had removed it. The officer didn't see anything suspicious on the seat.
The standard for guilt or innocence is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That doesn't mean *any* doubt, and that's the mistake people often make. It's *reasonable* doubt. Is it reasonable to assume he was telling the truth about that car seat? Would any reasonable person do what he did with that car seat? And if all his other explanations about the evidence presented were similar, is it reasonable to assume he was telling the truth about anything?
Another mistake people often make is to think it is enough that the most likely explanation points towards guilt. The proper question to ask is whether there is an alternate explanation for Nina's disappearance acceptable to a reasonable person. Could she have planned to disappear? Could someone else have killed her?
Richard Stallman is not the pope of PCs. His saying closed source is immoral doesn't mean anything. You may agree with him, and I agree that closed source isn't preferable. But while most people mind murder and rape and extinction of cute animals most people don't give a damn about software. For them it's a means to an end, and nothing more. Hence our current situation.
No, saying something is immoral by itself doesn't really mean anything. Stallman does, however, also have an argument that he bases this claim on. To put it simply, according to him closed source software is just a little more complicated version of not helping your neighbour, sharing things with other people. You'd do well to read some of his essays to get the more complete version and then decide whether you agree with him or not. Now you may still keep the view you've expressed here after that but it's pretty pointless to discuss his views without discussing how he justifies them.
And to further put it to perspective, on my 300MHz G3 iBook with 192MB NeoOffice was totally unusable and Ooo 1.x worked really well. When I upgraded to 2.x it was still better than Neo but also became pretty bad. However, most of the time OS X was a painfully slow since 192 seemed to really be too little for it while GNOME worked nicely.
No-one really forces one to use QT and GTK apps simultaneously.
Yes, but there are considerable benefits from package management also: one-click upgrades to everything ever installed, a easy place to find new software for any need, possibility to use shared libraries for everything that needs it etc.
This is *wonderful* when all you need is neatly packaged and coming up with a magic new Windows or Mac-like application packaging format will certainly not stop the problem of not always having software readily packaged for your distribution on Linux. The secret to these working on all Windows/Mac machines is simply that they are all controlled by a single entity and you will never have that with GNU/Linux. Switching to the same formula will not really do much more than introduce new problems.
No, they never helped some write software for there hardware, but they never tried to stop anyone either.
"To further complicate matters for Be, Apple refused to disclose architectural information about its G3 line of computers--information critical to making BeOS work on the latest hardware from Apple."
(From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS)
If a manufacturer creates hardware that limits a person's ability to modify the software that runs on it then let the market forces apply pressure. There won't be the plethora of open source software from the community to run on it and that will give an advantage to products that do allow the community to add to the product's value.
Oh yeah, the market forces will totally help because the majority of users want to run open source and other alternative operating systems on their hardware. The overwhelming popularity of Linux among the average computer user proves this, doesn't it? This should really be modded funny. I wouldn't depend on the market forces for preserving our freedoms. Seems to have worked out *really* well with DVDs, HDMI, etc. and the general populace just isn't interested in installing alternate OSes and the geeks are really just a tiny part of the market.
Sure it does look reasonable. It's like with Windows - most everyone uses it because it has by far the best choice in software (and especially games) even if it's overpriced and really bad at the same time.
In the end, games make or break a console and unless there's going to be some sort of a mass exodus of developers to the Xbox 360 or Wii, most of the exclusive good stuff will be on PS3.
The high price-point may drop their market share slightly and so will Wii if it succeeds but don't think for a second that Sony is going to lose their huge lead in game consoles overnight.
How about... something? Anything. If there's nothing original about it, it's not really next-gen or improving on the PS2 in any way and there's no incentive to drop 500 or 600 for it. Fine, the graphics may be enough to make people want one instead of the PS2 but I have to say it's nowhere as clear as it was with PS1 vs. PS2.
I value interoperability much, much more than some newish Word processor features that few know about and almost no-one uses. Even if they're really useful, they can't possibly be moreso than enabling people to exchange documents independent of what word processing software they happen to be using.
Fix the huge problem first and then aim for new features. I'm a little doubtful that a significant amount of the population will start using much of what is added at this point to the very mature product that is an office suite but even if some do, they'll still have the option of using a document format that only Word can read for it and using ODF when they don't need those features.
What are you talking about? There are plenty of good Creative Commons -licensed songs available. In fact, most netlabels use their licenses. Check out Creative Commons Three Sixty Five for a selected CC-licensed song a day and I'm sure you'll find many you'll like.
Not as resource intensive eh? I'd like to know what you're smoking. The transition to Ooo2 made it almost unusable on my iBook running Ubuntu with 288MB of RAM, it's constantly swapping with a single document open. 1.x worked very well.
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They're trying to keep this old game alive and with a community. I think the initial release of Quake Live, or this move, has little to do with cashing in and very much to do with love of the game.
Moreover, "making it more fun" is pretty much what they are attempting. It's been a known problem for a long time that a new player will get completely owned when they first try, it's just such a brutally skill-based game and a small pool of players makes large skill differences more likely in matchmaking. Few people enjoy total domination by their opponent.
Quake 3/Quake Live used to be a living esport, now most of the big tournaments are gone. The game is beautiful, especially when played at a professional level. I'm all for any attempts to revitalize this genre so that the FPS duel might still be a thing in esports in the future. Of course the risk here is that the game becomes unrecognizeable.
Sad. I guess when they told us the Zenimax deal didn't affect their independence in any way they were "forgetting" some details. So, probably no more Linux ports, no more GPLing of older engines. I guess they gave the control to the suits. The reasoning doesn't sound very solid either, it's assuming that the only reason for anyone ever to run linux is that all of it is free software. I don't disagree with that being a very good reason but it's definitely not the only one. The same poor argument could be used for not doing a Mac port. And I thought anyone trying to run cutting edge games on Linux had to use the Nvidia driver anyway, Doom 3 didn't work too well on ATI when it came out anyway, did it?
I feel you missed my point. I was only arguing that your decisions should not only be based on what you can get away with when closely scrutinizing a law, license or a contract but that you should also consider what's ethical. Laws are usually (if they're any good) based on a moral code. Licenses and contracts try to reflect the wishes of the people who write them.
I am fully aware of the contents of the GPL and as someone said the spirit of the GPL can only be defined by the FSF so if you want to look past the legalese you look to what they are saying and they're saying selling GPLed software is okay. They probably wouldn't like doing it through the App Store though.
Personally I'm all for the GPL as meant to be read by the FSF but in a situation such as the one we are discussing where the authors have used the GPL but have not themselves written it so their understanding of it's spirit may have been wrong you're going to have to take into consideration what their understanding of the spirit in which they were giving you access to the code was also if you want to do the right thing instead of just the legal thing.
Unless your ethical view is that the author is not really supposed to have the kind of control granted by copyright law over their work in the first place so their opinion is not so important at this point. A valid way of looking at it as well but one that depends on ethics rather than just doing anything you can legally get away with.
So if you find a loophole in the law that lets you get away with murder you'd have no problem doing it? There's something to be said for respecting the wishes of the people licensing you the software even if they've not been able to craft a perfect, no-loopholes legal document to describe them.
Never mind Freenet for this, you could use I2P which also features in-network Bittorrent. Of course if you really want to only share the torrents with an anonymising network you'll need to do modifications but at least it'll be easier when you can use existing tracker software. TOR's hidden services would work as well I suppose.
Just hosting the tracker on one of these networks is an interesting idea. It wouldn't provide any protection for the downloaders and seeders themselves but if people aren't quite ready to sacrifice download speeds at least it would shift the attention back to the people downloading again if the indexing sites/trackers were impossible to attack. It would be a step in the right direction. I can see why no-one has done this so far though.
Takes nearly equal skill to appreciate a match between the masters? Bullshit. I've been following the competetive 1v1 scene for a long time and I sure as hell don't have that kind of skill but I can still see when someone's skill is unbeliveable just like I can when I watch a sport like hockey. I may miss some details but I can still appreciate it and see a difference between the lesser and better players.
It may be fast-paced but Quake 3 1v1 (and by extension Quake Live) is very strategy-oriented. The main concern is about controlling the map by denying the powerups from your opponent which can be done by carefully timing the item spawns so the enemy never gets to see them.
Besides that, there are a number of ways you can play the game of course. Hastily engaging or staying back and avoiding confrontations etc.
Whether people will buy it or not if they cannot pirate it is purely academic since a computer game that is not based on online-play only will without a doubt be cracked. Show me one case where this isn't true.
It's hard to run the numbers because there are no numbers for a thing like this. All we know is that piracy is running rampant even with copy protection in use in gaming for as long as I can remember and all games so far get cracked unless they are online games where the server cannot be tampered with.
Now introducing a copy protection that is just as crackable as all those previous ones but making it highly inconvenient for the paying customers, even more so than a typical copy protection. I'm sure that this is going to be very successful in combating piracy. Especially seeing as it is now done on a platform whose users are more anti-DRM than average computer users.
We have lots of previous evidence how copy protection just does not work. Why exactly would this be better?
There are tons of bookmark sync sites, but what I'd really like not to lose is the ability to restore whatever tabs I had open when I closed my browser. Like session restore but without a crash. Doing that across different machines is cute but I'd settle even for a local one. Anything else that does this out there?
Oh, but there's another way to look at it. The line length should be such that it is readable, a general rule is that that amounts to around 7-10 words. Print & web layout designers frequently try to make the line length a readable one instead of just going with as long lines as possible. The downside is that then there may be a lot of unused space on the screen if the user has a big screen. Multiple paragraphs could fix that but it's not a trivial thing to do when screen sizes vary so much.
Because we all know the best way to measure the importance of a piece of software is how much hard drive space it takes.
I don't see where he says he considers OpenBSD + ports non-free. He is simply saying that he will not recommend something that advocates the use of non-free software, even if this is done just by making it very easy to install some of it (or for example containing advertisements and links to non-free software products).
It has nothing to do with whether OpenBSD itself is free or not, that is an entirely separate question from "What distribution would Richard Stallman recommend for you?"
Claiming that there is no difference seems to be what RMS was himself referring to in his post to the mailing list when he said:<blockquote><i>
"It looks like some people are having a discussion in which they
construct views they would find outrageous, attribute them to me, and
then try to blame me for them."</blockquote></i>
He also did not, apparently, begin this discussion about what he does or does not recommend himself but was just responding to an ongoing discussion there.
Try reading a little harder. He did not deem it non-free. He said he will not and does not personally recommend OpenBSD to people. Big difference and I can understand his position.
And to further put it to perspective, on my 300MHz G3 iBook with 192MB NeoOffice was totally unusable and Ooo 1.x worked really well. When I upgraded to 2.x it was still better than Neo but also became pretty bad. However, most of the time OS X was a painfully slow since 192 seemed to really be too little for it while GNOME worked nicely.
No-one really forces one to use QT and GTK apps simultaneously.
Yes, but there are considerable benefits from package management also: one-click upgrades to everything ever installed, a easy place to find new software for any need, possibility to use shared libraries for everything that needs it etc.
This is *wonderful* when all you need is neatly packaged and coming up with a magic new Windows or Mac-like application packaging format will certainly not stop the problem of not always having software readily packaged for your distribution on Linux. The secret to these working on all Windows/Mac machines is simply that they are all controlled by a single entity and you will never have that with GNU/Linux. Switching to the same formula will not really do much more than introduce new problems.
Oh yeah, the market forces will totally help because the majority of users want to run open source and other alternative operating systems on their hardware. The overwhelming popularity of Linux among the average computer user proves this, doesn't it? This should really be modded funny. I wouldn't depend on the market forces for preserving our freedoms. Seems to have worked out *really* well with DVDs, HDMI, etc. and the general populace just isn't interested in installing alternate OSes and the geeks are really just a tiny part of the market.
Sure it does look reasonable. It's like with Windows - most everyone uses it because it has by far the best choice in software (and especially games) even if it's overpriced and really bad at the same time.
In the end, games make or break a console and unless there's going to be some sort of a mass exodus of developers to the Xbox 360 or Wii, most of the exclusive good stuff will be on PS3.
The high price-point may drop their market share slightly and so will Wii if it succeeds but don't think for a second that Sony is going to lose their huge lead in game consoles overnight.
How about... something? Anything. If there's nothing original about it, it's not really next-gen or improving on the PS2 in any way and there's no incentive to drop 500 or 600 for it. Fine, the graphics may be enough to make people want one instead of the PS2 but I have to say it's nowhere as clear as it was with PS1 vs. PS2.
I value interoperability much, much more than some newish Word processor features that few know about and almost no-one uses. Even if they're really useful, they can't possibly be moreso than enabling people to exchange documents independent of what word processing software they happen to be using.
Fix the huge problem first and then aim for new features. I'm a little doubtful that a significant amount of the population will start using much of what is added at this point to the very mature product that is an office suite but even if some do, they'll still have the option of using a document format that only Word can read for it and using ODF when they don't need those features.
What are you talking about? There are plenty of good Creative Commons -licensed songs available. In fact, most netlabels use their licenses. Check out Creative Commons Three Sixty Five for a selected CC-licensed song a day and I'm sure you'll find many you'll like.
Not as resource intensive eh? I'd like to know what you're smoking. The transition to Ooo2 made it almost unusable on my iBook running Ubuntu with 288MB of RAM, it's constantly swapping with a single document open. 1.x worked very well.